When service delivery is governed by commercial expansion, the person requiring assistance becomes the means by which the system sustains itself. Their needs activate funding, referrals, data collection and repeated transactions. The commercial technocratic imperative occupies the centre of the matrix because it determines which activities continue, grow or disappear. Care becomes subordinate to those decisions. A person can be central to every public statement and peripheral to every consequential relationship.
The ABC’s Four Corners investigation into Veteran Benefits Australia describes this machinery: veterans recruited through giveaways, circulated among connected businesses and converted into repeated opportunities to bill the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. It reports billing involving practitioners whom veterans had never spoken to. Nick Flanigan denies advising improper practices; Tom Bailey disputes operational responsibility (Worthington, Donaldson and King, 2026). The wider question is how a public obligation to care became an opportunity to organise people’s vulnerability into a stream of private revenue.
This billing feast at public expense demands scrutiny of the arrangements that make extraction possible. Political and executive decisions determine what is funded, how access works, what requires verification and where accountability falls. Those decisions organise the opportunities available to everyone else. When revenue rewards multiplication of transactions, the proliferation of transactions is entirely predictable. Calling the outcome inevitable conceals the choices that produced its apparent inevitability. Responsibility reaches into the design and continued administration of the system.
The NDIS makes the wider problem explicit. A May 2023 NDIS Review paper identified fee-for-service incentives that reward the volume of supports delivered rather than their benefit to participants, including incentives to recommend additional services without improved outcomes (NDIS Review, 2023, pp. 18, 33). Here is the structural displacement: a funded need becomes a market opportunity, and the market’s continued activity becomes a measure of success. Someone receiving assistance is called a consumer, but meaningful control depends on whether their judgement can change the relationships through which assistance is provided.
Follow those relationships. Distress becomes a request for help. The request becomes information. Information establishes eligibility; eligibility opens a funding pathway; the pathway supports a business. Each transition changes what the person’s circumstances mean to those handling them. Suffering acquires an administrative identity and a commercial value. The system persists by repeating these conversions. Replacing a dishonest operator leaves that persistence untouched when the same relationships continue to select, reward and expand the same activities. The opportunity survives its occupants.
The entropy is lived as exhaustion, squandered time, fractured trust and futures narrowed by administrative demands. Institutions preserve their own order by exporting these costs into individual lives. Waiting consumes health and confidence; the gap between urgent need and institutional response creates demand for whoever promises easier access. An abandoned obligation becomes a market for assistance. Difficulty obtaining assistance becomes another market for navigation. The waste products of institutional indifference become commercial fodder. People bear the loss; somebody else discovers an asset. This reflects a wider zeitgeist: institutional neglect becomes the basis of profitable enterprise, while the language of care legitimises an arrangement organised around extraction.
Václav Havel understood that institutional power is reproduced through ordinary participation in its language and rituals. His living in truth challenged that reproduction by refusing to perform it (Havel, 1978, sections VI–VII). The contemporary difficulty extends this insight: demands to overcome institutional failure can themselves become commercially useful participation. A person seeks help escaping neglect and enters a business relationship built around that neglect. Their attempt to recover control supplies another opportunity to organise their dependence. Refusal becomes particularly difficult when necessary support lies behind the same gateway.
Reform faces this danger too. The ABC describes additional public funding following failures in veterans’ access to support (Worthington, Donaldson and King, 2026). If that money enters relationships still governed by commercial throughput, outrage helps enlarge the machinery it challenges. Public pressure becomes expenditure; expenditure becomes opportunity; opportunity becomes further commercial expansion. Resistance has been metabolised when the demand to correct institutional failure sustains a market organised around it. More money changes the scale while leaving the organising logic intact.
Accountability must follow control and benefit across the whole arrangement. The investigation describes scrutiny falling on individual practitioners while the corporate network escapes comparable attention (Worthington, Donaldson and King, 2026). Isolating responsibility at the point of billing protects the relations that organise the billing. Executives and political authorities must answer for the conditions they establish and preserve. A system that concentrates returns while dispersing consequences has already arranged who gets to survive its failures.
Putting people at the centre requires their needs and decisions to govern funding, referrals, information and the continuation of services. Essential support must remain available regardless of its commercial attractiveness. Good care must remain viable when it reduces the need for further transactions. Otherwise, institutional neglect and commercial ingenuity sustain one another. A society first leaves people carrying obligations it has failed to meet, then finances businesses to extract value from their predicament. Its failure to care has acquired a business model.
References
Havel, V. (1978) The power of the powerless. October. English-language PDF reproduced by the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research. Available at: https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/1979/01/the-power-of-the-powerless.pdf (Accessed: 6 October 2026).
NDIS Review (2023) The role of pricing and payment approaches in improving participant outcomes and scheme sustainability. May. Available at: https://www.ndisreview.gov.au/sites/default/files/resource/download/pricing-payments_0.pdf (Accessed: 6 October 2026).
Worthington, E., Donaldson, A. and King, M. (2026) ‘They built a business empire that cashes in on veterans. It’s made millions’, ABC News, Four Corners, 6 October. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-06/veteran-benefits-australia-business-empire-four-corners/107208188 (Accessed: 6 October 2026).
One reply on “Veterans, the NDIS and the Business of Neglect”
The problems exposed in veteran care are not isolated: similar dynamics are visible in the NDIS and reflect a broader tendency to turn care into markets whose growth becomes progressively detached from the purposes they were created to serve. As a systems theorist, I am interested in the deeper problem: the institutional arrangements we rely upon to understand and correct these failures can themselves exclude forms of analysis that challenge the assumptions on which those arrangements depend, leaving governments repeatedly supplied with administratively legible explanations while the underlying relationship between commerce, care and institutional self-preservation remains largely untouched.
LikeLike